10 Most Ambitious Superhero Movies of All Time

Jun 05, 2026 - 10:13

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10 Most Ambitious Superhero Movies of All Time

Published Jun 5, 2026, 12:05 AM EDT

Jeremy has more than 2500 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows.
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You could be someone who’s largely apathetic to movies in general and still be, in all likelihood, at least a little aware of how superheroes have been kind of a big deal lately. Maybe the 2010s was the golden era, and there was also a fruitful 2000s leading up to that next decade’s dominance, but you can’t rule out the 2020s when something like Avengers: Doomsday is still pretty hyped (at least at the time of writing, because time will ultimately tell whether it’s any good or not).

Doomsday seems like it'll be pretty darn ambitious, so looking at superhero movies that have already come out – and focusing on ones that were impressively ambitious – feels like it could be worth doing. These aren’t necessarily the best superhero movies of all time, but more ones that did something new, started some kind of trend, successfully threw together countless iconic characters on screen, or even did all of the above, to some extent.

10 'Spider-Man' (2002)

Tobey Maguire in the spidey suit staring ahead in Spider-Man, 2002.

Sure, X-Men (2000) and Iron Man (2008) are worth shouting out if you're talking about superhero movies that helped kick off some kind of overall trend. X-Men was a flawed but solid movie for its time that showed you could make something with tons of superheroes work on the big screen, and then Iron Man ultimately served as the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, albeit in a way where it didn’t feel like dozens of later films were part of the plan (at least not at first).

So, why not include them while including Spider-Man? Maybe because Spider-Man (2002) is a better film, and also because it’s hard not to be fond of it, if you're one of those people who can remember it being the first big superhero/comic book movie you ever saw. It’s not a perfect film, but it gets all the basics right and hits all the beats it has to quite effortlessly, as an origin story, paving the way for various Spider-Man movies – and other superhero fare – to come.

9 'Watchmen' (2009)

With Watchmen, there was an attempt to get some very beloved source material (to say the least) adapted into a single movie, and that attempt was, honestly, a mostly successful one. There are things to nitpick here if you want, and like just about any adaptation, it’s not a one-to-one thing, but Watchmen does look and feel like the graphic novel series of the same name.

It’s also a film that gets across the deconstructive elements of the source material, being like a psychological drama with superheroes, and also having some distinctive sci-fi elements, plus a sense of brutality that, even nowadays, you don’t see much of in comic book/superhero movies. Watchmen is a better adaptation than some give it credit for, and there’s a lot here worth celebrating and admiring.

8 'Superman' (1978)

Superman wasn’t the first superhero movie ever, but it was the first big-budget one, and also arguably the first superhero movie about a recognizable character that did such a character justice. Like 2002’s Spider-Man, Superman (1978) does what you'd expect an origin story to do, but the ambition here comes from when you consider the time in which the film came out.

It was a risk, and a lot of money was spent on the whole thing, and the movie had a tagline it really needed to live up to, since that tagline was “You'll believe a man can fly.” If Superman hadn’t made people believe, and if it had been a failure in other ways, the whole future of blockbuster cinema (especially blockbusters involving superheroes, for hopefully obvious reasons) might well have looked incredibly different.

7 'The Dark Knight' (2008)

The Dark Knight is one of Christopher Nolan’s biggest movies, and it’s probably also his best film overall, too. It comes in the middle of a trilogy which is made up of two other movies that definitely aren’t bad, and then The Dark Knight in the middle of them, which doesn’t really have anything bad in it, delivering everything you'd want out of a comic book movie, plus some things you might not really expect to see in a comic book movie.

The Dark Knight manages to work exceptionally well as a fairly action-heavy crime/thriller film that just so happens to have Batman – plus some other associated characters – in it.

It’s that quality which makes it feel extra ambitious, since The Dark Knight manages to work exceptionally well as a fairly action-heavy crime/thriller film that just so happens to have Batman – plus some other associated characters – in it. There is also an argument to be made that The Dark Knight Rises is more ambitious, but that film sort of collapses under its own weight (even if it’s not bad overall), so The Dark Knight feels more worthy of a shout-out. It’s just cleaner, more well-crafted, and overall quite a bit more satisfying.

6 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' (2014)

The first X-Men was promising, then the second was an improvement in pretty much every way, and then things got a bit messy, what with a third movie and a solo Wolverine prequel, neither of which were particularly well-received. But then in 2011, there was X-Men: First Class, which was a better prequel, and then a few years later, X-Men: Days of Future Past came out, and it was a grand old crossover between the “original” X-Men movies and First Class.

There’s a time-travel plot that gets everyone on the same wavelength, more or less, having to team up to prevent a dystopian future that seems otherwise inevitable. And maybe it was inevitable, since the world of Logan is pretty desolate, but then again, the X-Men have now joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Logan might not be canon, and so it’s all very confusing. Eh, plenty of movies in the series are still good. Maybe time-travel is going to muddy any timeline, but still, what a time-travel movie this one is.

5 'The Batman' (2022)

Now, The Batman is ranked higher than The Dark Knight here, but that’s not a suggestion that it’s a better Batman movie overall than The Dark Knight. Ambition is what’s being focused on, and The Batman is a hugely ambitious movie, with the runtime standing out as the first thing that feels notable, given it’s just a minute or two shy of three hours, in total.

Also, it introduces a new Batman without doing it as an origin story, and then it also ventures outside of expected territory by de-emphasizing action more than just about any other big-budget superhero movie in recent memory. The Batman is all about the quieter and moody side of Batman, with detective work being highlighted more than fight sequences, and all in a way that gives this version of Batman a genuinely interesting character arc, too. Like a certain Spider-Man movie that’s about to be mentioned, it’s a shame that, at the time of writing, the wait for some kind of follow-up movie set in a world this interesting has been more than four years (and counting).

4 'Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse' (2023)

After Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse came out and more or less blew everyone’s minds, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse had its work cut out for it, needing to live up to the first. Thankfully, it did that and then some, going above and beyond in the sense that it felt much bigger, and ran for a fair few minutes longer, and increasing the scope of something that was already about the multiverse can’t have been easy.

Things overflowed when it came to this movie, because it really doesn’t conclude, and there’s been one hell of a prolonged cliffhanger because, at the time of writing, it’s been three years since Across the Spider-Verse came out. Still, it’s an easy movie to rewatch and pick up details or isolated jokes you might've missed the first time around, so that’s nice, at least.

3 'Zack Snyder's Justice League' (2021)

Zack Snyder's Justice League - 2021 - Superman hovers over Earth with his arms open

2017’s Justice League was possibly ambitious, but not in a good way, since it was really quite a mess, owing to how it tried to do way too much in too short a runtime. Maybe 2021’s recut, called Zack Snyder’s Justice League, is a lot spread out over too long a runtime, in the eyes of some, but it works a whole lot better than the 2017 cut, and it’s hard not to be at least a bit impressed by the grandiosity of it all.

At the time of writing, it’s the last superhero movie Zack Snyder has directed, and it feels like it could be a grand finale of sorts to that part of his filmography. It is the most Snyder-ish of all the Snyder movies, and, in all likelihood, very much the movie he wanted to make (hence his name being in the title and stuff). It’s a four-hour-long superhero epic that’s overflowing with ideas, but that’s not really a problem for most of its runtime (it’s only the endless set-ups for movies that'll probably never come, in its final 20 to 30 minutes, that’s a bit hard to defend nowadays).

2 'Avengers: Infinity War' (2018)

Since it got labeled – both sincerely and ironically – as “the most ambitious crossover event in history,” it feels more than fitting to mention Avengers: Infinity War whenever you're talking about extra ambitious superhero movies. There was an attempt at getting most of the main heroes who’d appeared in a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie in this one film, and said attempt was a largely successful one.

Certain characters do get more screen time than others, and anyone rocking up for Hawkeye or Ant-Man specifically might've left disappointed, but the size of this film still feels impressive. Avengers: Infinity War does all that while also being the movie that made Thanos perhaps the most memorable villain of the MCU so far, after earlier films had shown him kind of hovering in the background. There’s also the rather bold way this movie ends, which, of course, leads into…

1 'Avengers: Endgame' (2019)

…Avengers: Endgame, which may or may not be even more ambitious than Avengers: Infinity War. That 2018 epic ended with Thanos actually winning, and half of all life in the universe disappearing in an instant. Avengers: Endgame picks up with all that life being avenged, albeit emptily, and then there’s a big time-skip before those who are left devise a time-travel-related plan to get the disappeared people back.

And it all sounds a little silly when you lay it out like that, but this was a logical continuation of the events depicted in Infinity War, and a film that did a lot to pay off – or have callbacks to – various movies that came before. There’s also a dramatic and cathartic final act to Endgame that future Avengers movies will probably struggle to exceed, as far as spectacle and sheer emotion go (still, never say never).

Avengers: Endgame

Release Date April 26, 2019

Runtime 181 Minutes

Writers Keith Giffen, Stan Lee, Larry Lieber, Don Heck, Jim Starlin, Joe Simon, Steve Englehart, Jack Kirby, Steve Gan, Bill Mantlo, Stephen McFeely, Christopher Markus